Epson 4900 $1000 Rebate Catch?

[lester_laforce]

<p>Several retailers including B&H and Atlex are offering the "new" Epson 4900 10 ink-set printer for $1000 off at $1400 w/free shipping.<br>

Does anyone have any thoughs re: why Epson would do this? Perhaps they are going to release a new model soon?</p>

[howard_m]

<p>the 4900 is relatively new. The high end Epson & Canon printers can almost always be found on sale or rebate. There isn't that big a market for them and times are hard. No one wants to sit on inventory or idle a factory. There's really no 'catch'</p>

[charles_wood]

<p>These types of offers are commonplace among HP, Canon and Epson. They basically give away the hardware and recover their costs/profits in ink. I recently replaced my Canon ipf8000 with a new ipf8300. So-called MSRP is $6K. The actual distributor street price was about $3995 with a discount to to $3295.00 plus a $1000 rebate check from Canon. This dropped the price to $2295.00 including free shipping of a nearly 500 lb printer on a pallet. To top it all off, the distributor threw in an iPad2 that I promptly sold for above retail. My net cost was about $1700 and I received a fresh ink set (12x300 ml cartridges @ $170.00 each) with the new printer that sell for over $2000.00. You do the math!</p>

<p>It really illustrates the obscene profit in inks. It's likely a set of twelve Canon 700 ml ink cartridges for the printer contain no more than a few dollars worth of ink at the manufacturing level yet the street price for a set of twelve is about $3600.00.</p>

[paulie_smith1]

<p>80ml of inks in this one when you buy it. You are looking at $1100 very quickly for a full set of inks. Many of the suppliers are out of stock on the inks for the printer. You may end up with a nice printer you can't use for a few weeks to a month or more because you can't get ink for it.</p>